A nice conky file, for all

Posted on July 17th, 2008 in Applications, Tweaks by admin

Screenshot here, config file below:

Have a nice customized .bashrc file

Posted on July 16th, 2008 in Applications, Commandline Tools, Tweaks by admin

Screenshot

Right Click the file below and save it to your home folder.

Backup your current bash profile by  “mv .bashrc .bashrc.bak

then mv bashrc.txt .bashrc

File: bashrc

Kudos goes to ayoli for this.

Installing & Using Gnome-Do

Posted on July 14th, 2008 in Applications, Gnome by admin

GNOME Do (Do) is an intelligent launcher tool that makes performing common tasks on your computer simple and efficient. Do not only allows you to search for items in your desktop environment (e.g. applications, contacts, bookmarks, files, music), it also allows you to specify actions to perform on search results (e.g. run, open, email, chat, play). Want to send an email to mom? Simply type “email mom.” Want to listen to some music? Simply type “play beatles.” Do provides instantaneous, action-oriented desktop search results that adapt to reflect your habits and preferences. For example, if you use Firefox web browser often, typing “f” in Do will launch it. Or, if you visit The New York Times webpage often, Do will open it if you simply type “nyt.” Unlike other search tools that present search results as flat, homogeneous lists, Do provides familiar graphical depictions of search results that assure you that your intent is being realized correctly; searching for “mom” will show a picture of mom, and searching for “beatles” will show a Beatles album cover. Do has many more powerful and exciting capabilities that must be seen to be appreciated.

Installing & Using TimeVault in Ubuntu/Debian

Posted on July 14th, 2008 in Applications, Debian, Ubuntu by admin

TimeVault is a simple front-end for making snapshots of a set of directories. Snapshots are a copy of a directory structure or file at a certain point in time. Restore functionality is integrated into Nautilus - previous versions of a file or directory that has a snapshot can be accessed by examining the properties and selecting the ‘Previous Versions’ tab.

Snapshots are protected from accidental deletion or modification since they are read-only by default. The super-user can delete intermediate snapshots to save space, but files and directories that existed before or after the deletion will still be accessible.

A snapshot is a copy of a directory at a certain point in time. Snapshots don’t use space for the files that haven’t changed but instead simply increment the link count for them. On Linux, when a file is deleted, the link count is decremented, but it isn’t actually removed until the link count hits zero.

Only files are hard-linked this way. Directories have to be recreated for technical reasons (since a hard-link is actually the file it points to, you would find yourself in a completely different path if directories were hard-linked).

How to turn off Firefox 3’s “awesome bar”

Posted on July 13th, 2008 in Applications by admin

In Firefox 3, the Location Bar received a number of improvements. Among those improvements was the move to a XUL richlistbox widget for the auto-complete dropdown. This allowed styled URL/title information, favicons, and highlighted match information. This preference determines how many entries should appear (at most) in the dropdown.  Many find Firefox 3’s “awesome bar” quite annoying.  Luckily  this is easy to disable.

First, in the address bar type:   “about:config”  (without the quotes).

In the about:config search bar type:  Browser.urlbar.maxRichResults

The default value is set to 12.  If you set this interger to 0, nothing will display in the “awesome bar” any longer.

Import PeerGuardian Blocklists into Ktorrent & Deluge

Posted on June 30th, 2008 in Applications, Networking by admin

Many lovers of PeerGuardian are out there, and some just happen to use linux. Luckily we have bit torrent clients that support PeerGuardian blocklists directly in the client, rather than affecting our entire internet connection. This is a rather simple prodcedure in both cases of Ktorrent and Deluge.

Note: Blocklists are not a fool proof protection and can come with their own problems. Please read up on the effectiveness of blocklists. That being said, every little bit helps.

Also See:

  1. Basics of iptables
  2. Iptables: How to save and restore rules at boot & shutdown
  3. Beating Sandvine on Linux with iptables
  4. How to Encrypt Bit Torrent Traffic With Ktorrent and Azurues

Renaming multiple files with ‘rename’ command

Posted on June 10th, 2008 in Applications by admin


The syntax for the rename command is:

rename [ -v ] [ -n ] [ -f ] perl_expression [ files ]

to rename for example multiple photo files with ‘.JPG’ extension to ‘.jpg’ extension:

rename -v ’s/\.JPG$/\.jpg/’ *.JPG

Put irssi in a chroot jail

Posted on June 5th, 2008 in Applications, Commandline Tools, Security by admin

Irssi is a popular IRC client. Its a very popular client for small window managers like fluxbox. This short howto will walk you though the steps for setting up a jail that only has a few commands in it and will help create a much safer IRC enviroment for you. There are a couple things you will need to have installed before we get started. First you need irssi, next you will need jail. First step is to install jail and irssi, so that irssi will work from your regular linux or unix install.

Install IpodLinux on your iPod

Posted on May 20th, 2008 in Applications by admin

iPodLinux is an open source venture into porting Linux onto the iPod (http://www.apple.com/ipod/). So far, they have successfully ported a customized uClinux (http://www.uclinux.org) kernel to the iPod, and written a simple user interface for it dubbed podzilla. Additional applications and modules have been written, adding many capabilities not found in Apple’s firmware. iPodLinux currently works on all iPod generations with the exception of the 2nd/3rd generation iPod nano, 6th generation iPod classic, all iPod shuffles and the iPod Touch. Donations always help when it comes to supporting new hardware. Progress can be tracked on the Project Status.

How to use lzma for compression

Posted on May 19th, 2008 in Applications by admin

LZMA is an improved version of famous LZ77 compression algorithm. It was improved in way of maximum increasing of compression ratio, keeping high decompression speed and low memory requirements for decompressing. lzma command line tool has a similar interface to gzip(1) and bzip2(1) and is intended to make use of LZMA compression easy for the users who are already familiar with gzip and bzip2.

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